I'm not sure I buy Arm's argument. It is hard to describe the degree to which policymakers in China [0][1], India [2][3][4], and South Korea [5] are all heavily promoting RISC-V in order to reduce vendor dependency as well as build their own competitive and domestic design ecosystems.
Additionally, a significant portion of Arm's China, US, and India engineering and product leadership has left to work on RISC-V startups and companies now.
That said, I can see Arm being leveraged by other Softbank owned companies like Ampere (which they already do) and Graphcore, with an eventual merger of all 3 into some form of a mega-corp due to operational overlaps and efficiencies, but this would be defensive in nature given the degree to which the industry has aligned with funding a RISC-V ecosystem and how RISC-V's governance and leadership consists of major players and leaders in the chip design space.
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Edit: Can't reply
> It is also a bad look when they sue Qualcomm for selling chips in a way that Arm does not like.
That's why Qualcomm is also betting on RISC-V as well after acquiring Ventana [6] and is participating in India's DeepTech initiative [7], which has been targeting RISC-V startups as well as Renesas [8] in Japan+India taping out a 3nm RISC-V processor for automotive and IoT usecases. And also why FuriosaAI in SK has been working on RISC-V, as well as the multitude of fabless players in China.
It's the same thing that happened with IBM POWER vs x86 decades ago with an added sovereignty component.
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Edit 2: After thinking some more, I think a case could be made for Arm to survive but not thrive in the same manner as Minitel continued to kick around for so long due to France's stress on technological sovereignty. Long term, I think RISC-V will eat a large portion of Arm's commodity and embedded computing market share, but Arm (and moreso Softbank) is attempting to position itself as critical to British [9], Malaysian [10] (they remain a major semiconductor hub), and even Indian [11] attempts at design sovereignty.
I can see a British-Japanese alignment around eventually merging Softbank properties like Arm, Graphcore, Ampere, and Rapidus into a British-Japanese version of Intel such that Graphcore+Ampere leverage Arm's ISA for HPC and Embedded/Telecom usecases respectively and Rapidus becomes their foundry.
Additionally, I can see the Japanese government pushing it's players to heavily leverage Arm as well - especially given that all the major players in Japan already cooperate, have an ownership stake in, or are partially owned by Softbank.
No, Qualcomm was willing to pay the Nuvia license fees, but Arm said that this is too little, because they licensed Nuvia only for products to be sold for servers, which was expected to be a small market, and now Qualcomm wanted to reuse some of the work in laptop CPUs.
So Arm requested increased license fees, which Qualcomm refused, claiming that the license contracts that both Qualcomm and Nuvia had remain valid, with their already negotiated license fees.
Yes, ARM did lose the case, but I attribute that to an ignorant judge as the license wasn’t transferable to Qualcomm from Nuvia. Regardless, ARM will have their day when it comes time to license the next ARM architecture version.
Qualcomm also had their own architectural license, but Arm claimed that neither of the 2 licenses is applicable.
I have read at that time the documents presented by both parties, but essential details of the contracts were missing from the public documents, so it was impossible to know which of Qualcomm and Arm was right.
Nevertheless, the argumentation presented by Qualcomm seemed far more plausible, unless it would have been contradicted by some of the redacted out contract details.
Arm has not shown in public any information that could have proven that they are right, so they, or their supporters, may not say that the judge has made a wrong decision.
Supposing that the decision was wrong, Arm has preferred to keep secret their arrangements with the customers, instead of proving that they were right, presumably because they might lose more money if other customers learned the exact details of the contract with Qualcomm, so they could request similar terms.
While I believe that it is right for Qualcomm to have won the trial, I strongly dislike the fact that Qualcomm now designs their own cores instead of licensing them from Arm.
The reason is that the Arm cores have excellent documentation, on par with that of the Intel-AMD CPUs, while the Qualcomm cores, like the Apple cores, have non-existent documentation. Moreover, Qualcomm is so silly that they have always obfuscated even what Arm cores they used in their older products. Whenever I evaluated some smartphone with Qualcomm SoC it was impossible to find any useful information on the Qualcomm site, but I had to go to various third parties to learn what is actually inside the Qualcomm SoC, to be able to compare it with alternatives.
Orthogonal question for Dang or someone who knows -
Do downvotes, account flaggings, and/or high posting volumes trigger this? I run into it frequently whenever I get downvotes. I almost never used to get this before 2022 or so.
I have experienced this issue some time too - I think if you post some "controversial" comment (judged by many quick upvotes and downvotes) it triggers a "cooling down" period before you can post a reply to your immediate child comments in the thread (or it could be mod-triggered). This ensures you don't dominate the thread, and allows a conversation with other participants to develop. Based on how others react to the comments, I assume it also gives the mods a better idea if they need to intervene. I found it a minor annoyance at first, but have learnt to appreciate it - thoughtful comments (with careful moderation) from a diverse group of people is what makes a community like this valuable.
I've gotten into plenty of flamewars with Dems, Republicans, Anti-Vaxxers, Pro-Vaxxers, AI Luddites, AI Fundamentalists, China bots, China hawks, Apple fanatics, Apple haters, far-right, far-left, pro-WFH, anti-WFH, pro-immigration, anti-immigration, and others on HN.
I just don't care about filtering my opinions and use HN as a way to kvetch and impart some information I may know about.
I also think that the quality declined with the incoming AI crowd but on the other hand I also got older over the last years and increased my own skill level...
Additionally, a significant portion of Arm's China, US, and India engineering and product leadership has left to work on RISC-V startups and companies now.
That said, I can see Arm being leveraged by other Softbank owned companies like Ampere (which they already do) and Graphcore, with an eventual merger of all 3 into some form of a mega-corp due to operational overlaps and efficiencies, but this would be defensive in nature given the degree to which the industry has aligned with funding a RISC-V ecosystem and how RISC-V's governance and leadership consists of major players and leaders in the chip design space.
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Edit: Can't reply
> It is also a bad look when they sue Qualcomm for selling chips in a way that Arm does not like.
That's why Qualcomm is also betting on RISC-V as well after acquiring Ventana [6] and is participating in India's DeepTech initiative [7], which has been targeting RISC-V startups as well as Renesas [8] in Japan+India taping out a 3nm RISC-V processor for automotive and IoT usecases. And also why FuriosaAI in SK has been working on RISC-V, as well as the multitude of fabless players in China.
It's the same thing that happened with IBM POWER vs x86 decades ago with an added sovereignty component.
---
Edit 2: After thinking some more, I think a case could be made for Arm to survive but not thrive in the same manner as Minitel continued to kick around for so long due to France's stress on technological sovereignty. Long term, I think RISC-V will eat a large portion of Arm's commodity and embedded computing market share, but Arm (and moreso Softbank) is attempting to position itself as critical to British [9], Malaysian [10] (they remain a major semiconductor hub), and even Indian [11] attempts at design sovereignty.
I can see a British-Japanese alignment around eventually merging Softbank properties like Arm, Graphcore, Ampere, and Rapidus into a British-Japanese version of Intel such that Graphcore+Ampere leverage Arm's ISA for HPC and Embedded/Telecom usecases respectively and Rapidus becomes their foundry.
Additionally, I can see the Japanese government pushing it's players to heavily leverage Arm as well - especially given that all the major players in Japan already cooperate, have an ownership stake in, or are partially owned by Softbank.
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[0] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260213PD208/arm-risc-v-com...
[1] - https://www.cas.cn/cm/202601/t20260126_5097208.shtml
[2] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260216VL205.html
[3] - https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetailm.aspx?PRID=2224839&...
[4] - https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1820621&re...
[5] - https://m.blog.naver.com/nanambook/223316051806
[6] - https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2025/12/qualcomm-acqu...
[7] - https://idtalliance.org/
[8] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250923VL201/renesas-3nm-re...
[9] - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/building-a-sovere...
[10] - https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/arm-malaysia-silicon-vision
[11] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250918VL202/arm-design-chi...